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There’s the old theater maxim about breaking through the fourth wall to pierce the boundary between performer and audience. The Degenerate Art Ensemble’s roving, multi-venue piece “Red Shoes” pulls a host of tricks out of the bag, just about everything except a white rabbit (though there is a wolf in grandma’s clothing). The entertainment uses Butoh-inspired dance, a dirge-like marching band in full regalia, a string ensemble, a sixty-member choir, video, and sculpture, all in support of theatrical musings on the Red Shoes/Red Riding Hood legends.

Degenerate Art Ensemble takes their name from a 1930s art exhibition in pre-war Germany that featured works purged from local museums because the government deemed them subversive. Joshua Kohl composes and directs the music, and Haruko Nishimura is the main choreographer and dancer, as well as the focal point of the piece. She shares the choreography with Dohee Lee, who dances, drums, and sings in dark counterpoint to Nishimura’s girlish innocence.

The design of the piece does more than break down barriers; the audience becomes a supporting player in this event. Pairs of ushers holding huge red paper lanterns at the end of bamboo poles escort the audience from place to place. In the cathedral courtyard section, the crowd hoists Nishimura aloft and passes her over their heads in a mosh pit of sorts, prompted by gestures from band leader Kohl. Crowd control was never this much fun.

The gods were smiling down favorably on the show that opening night. It was a beautiful evening, and there was a gibbous moon to punctuate the outdoor segments. As much as music and dance were the core of the work, this was a show about striking visual moments. One of the most memorable images happened as the crowd was led into the courtyard of St. James Cathedral for the second section. As we filed in a long line past the gates of the yard, the choir could be heard behind the wall, but before we ever saw them we could see the conductor, hands aloft, as he stood spot-lit on the roof of the church, the moon looming dramatically behind him. Another haunting tableau was the final movement of the piece. Nishimura and Lee do their final tango on a stage before the museum’s loading dock. A bonfire is off to the side. The wolf (Lee) eventually strips down to a white slip, then helps the girl on with her clunky white platform shoes. Hobbled by the shoes’ braces, Nishimura circles around the crowd, crosses the street, then disappears slowly down an alley until she is out of sight.

That melancholy image was the end of the piece, at least formally. But the crowd continued to linger around the raised platform as the musicians packed up their instruments, put them on their backs, and headed out into the night. Eventually Nishimura returned from the shadows, still barefoot as she negotiated the grit and glass of the alley. This unofficial coda seemed somehow a part of the evening as well, the afterimage that lingers in a curtain-less performance.

Red shoes and Red Riding Hood; white-garbed surgeons plucking at string instruments beneath a white operating-theater tent; two dancers circling round and round in a cathedral courtyard to snippets of techno pop. What’s an audience member to make of all the hullabaloo? Some parts were absolutely transcendent, some perhaps a touch self-conscious, but there was a strong feeling of process in all the workings. This is how art is put together, and for this performance, the audience doesn’t just bear witness but becomes an integral part of the statement. Both the red shoes and the wolf of the fairy tales eventually swallow up a young girl whole, literally or metaphorically, and so possession is probably at play here as well, as is the approach/avoidance dynamic of the artist to her work. But at the end of the day this seemed to be about spectacle, a no-holds barred, pulling-out-all-the-stops extravaganza. If you didn’t like the weather, all you had to do was wait a few moments until the next system blew in.

Maybe it’s because I saw it in preview as a stand-alone piece, but the first section seemed the most self-contained, and also the most successful blend of all the different elements. Nishimura and Lee dance as Red Riding Hood and the wolf/grandma, sometimes together and sometimes solo, to a lovely string accompaniment with a split-screen video in the background. There’s a nice interplay between naivete and curiosity on the one hand and violent appetite on the other. Push and pull, repel and embrace. The heart of Butoh is a mix of exquisite beauty and pain, and their duets throughout the evening spark from the tension between these polarities. Both dancers are also accomplished singers, and their vocal singsongs and sometimes comical mutterings played nicely off the string ensemble to the right of the audience.

With so many moving parts, both within and without, sight lines also become part of the experience. This was a performance that required some effort on the part of the viewers; no comfy seat with program tucked neatly under your leg. In the cavernous indoor space used for the first section, people in the back had trouble seeing, especially when the movement was on the floor, and so some started congregating on the sides, or alternately standing and sitting. Later in the evening Nishimura performed a solo dance in the fountain in front of the museum, and here again the audience milled back and forth between pillars for a better view. One of the lantern bearers told me afterwards that this was her favorite part, but I got only sporadic glimpses of Nishimura splashing in the fountain and tussling with a glittery metal serpent as the wolf kicked in with throaty howls from a small platform across the way.

During the fountain section, one of the crew suggested that people could cross the street for a more panoramic view, and I joined a small group of people in front of the parking lot. A man standing next to me asked what all this meant. I looked at him a little puzzled (it was too early in the evening for significance), and then realized that he had just wandered into the event on his way home from work. I told him I didn’t know yet, but that he was watching performance, a free one sponsored by the Frye museum. The man smiled and replied, “I have no idea what this is, but it’s beautiful.” Maybe that’s a nice succinct comment on the evening as a whole.

What would this performance have been like on a night of more typical Seattle drizzle and chill? This was the first of three Thursday night performances, and so odds are some lucky people will get a chance to find out. The performances are all free, and sold out in a matter of days, possibly a result of the sprawling ensemble of musicians, techies, and ushers that support the piece. Many in the audience seemed to know each other, or know people involved in the production. If you don’t already have a ticket, you can still get a taste of what the DAE does inside the museum itself through June 19th. (This was the one venue we never got to experience as part of the performance.) The exhibit, also free, has videos, costumes, and props from past performances. Those prosthetic white shoes in the final scene didn’t develop overnight; you can see their precursors among other paraphernalia used in previous shows.

We are awash in a sea of images, but few artists celebrate this condition as enthusiastically as Gabrielle Bakker.Her recent work makes a virtue of its eclecticism, cobbling together highly original pictures from a huge array of sources, whose only common element is that the artist finds them worthy.It is one thing to appreciate art and artists from places as disparate as Classical Rome and Greece, Renaissance Italy and Flanders, and early 20th Century Paris; it is quite another to attempt to put together coherent pictures in which all of these influences – and more – are in play.

Gabrielle’s work has long worn its links to artistic predecessors on its sleeve.But on closer examination even her simplest images defy attribution to a particular artist, or a particular narrative.A painting like Truth, for example, is superficially a portrait of an idealized young woman painted in the style of the Tuscan Renaissance.But a quick look at earlier artists like Sandro Botticelli, Piero della Francesca, or Fillipo Lippi does not come up with a match, or even a close resemblance.Gabrielle’s woman, unlike those of her sources, is ahistorical, unmoored.While every character in the paintings of the earlier artists plays a clearly-defined role in a story from religion or mythology that every contemporary observer was expected to already know, Gabrielle’s woman stares out at us with an atmosphere of mystery, and withholding.Although she resembles in a vague way the artist herself, she is not of our world, or any world.She is static, complacent, unblinking.Her face is painted so as to suggest true dimensionality, but in a limited way, like a bas-relief framed with hair.There are no details of clothing or setting that can place her in time or space.She teases us with the prospect of recognition and understanding, but there’s no resolving her enigmas.Who is she, and what is she doing?We aren’t sure, and the artist isn’t saying.

The above description might also serve for much of Gabrielle’s earlier work, but the true revelation in the current show are the large recent paintings, which bring an enormous new set of references into the mix and thus raise the stakes considerably.These new works are the most ambitious Gabrielle has ever done, and the quality of the execution and attention to surface and detail is extremely impressive. Everything about them suggests that attention must be paid, but they are puzzle pictures and intriguing images rather than definitive statements, so as with Truth, the observer is left to draw their own conclusions.

I want very badly to understand the relation between the two magnificent women in Geisha and Surfer, for example, but they seem neither aware of each other, nor of us. Or, are they? In this major painting, a successful melding of wildly disparate styles, the key may be the hand mirror held by the geisha in the foreground.The geisha is seated in a room in front of a very unusual wall.The left hand portion of the wall has been painted with a sort of landscape with highly stylized, neo-Japanese waves set against a mountain range in silhouette; covering part of the upper wall is a dark, highly dimensional swag of decorated drape.The drape, the only totally realistic element in the image (it’s effectively trompe l’oeil), seems to have been drawn back like a stage curtain to reveal the drama in progress.

On the right-hand side of the wall a painting of an androgynous figure in black silhouette, with wavelike white curls (a reverse version of the white-faced, black-haired geisha), is hung on top of a partly-visible banner with Japanese characters.But the focus of the back wall, is the center section, against which a tall, vertical painting is leaning. The painting features none other than Botticelli’s Venus, recast as a California surfer girl, dressed in a pink bikini and coddling a flesh-colored, decidedly phallic surfboard.The much larger Geisha, whose non-dimensional kimono is entirely made up of painted, collage-based origami paper, rests one hand on what appears to be an ancient Greek mask of tragedy; with the other, she stares at what might be her own face, but might as easily be the face of the Surfer Girl, visible above her own head; meanwhile, the Surfer Girl seems to be gazing at us. Gabrielle links the two women visually with a series of compositional gestures, such as the hair bun of the geisha serving as pubic hair for the standing girl.

The painting virtually grabs us by the lapels and insists we contemplate these imaginative connections between goddesses Greek and Pop, culture secular and sacred.But resolution is impossible, any more than deciphering the hanging Kanji banner, a caption in a language we will never know.Pictures for Gabrielle retain their magic, but not their meaning; she makes the case with her work that a powerful image doesn’t need an overarching message or coherent narrative to be effective as art.

Equally engaging, and offering more possibilities of interpretation, are a smaller but very layered series of paintings of a sort of love triangle involving a geisha, a Minotaur, and a dwarf/child.Consisting of three works (a fourth is in progress), the works are hung so as to be read as a sequence, and they can on one level be seen as a sort of feminist turning of the tables on the aggressive spirit of triumphant Modernism, symbolized by Picasso and his personal identification with the half-man, half-beast of Greek mythology.We’re already on notice that Picasso is in the house, by the many images which suggest the work of the master, specifically his neo-cubist fracturing of the figure and the face.Most literally derivative is Gabrielle’s 2005 Theseus Slaying the Minotaur, directly based on Picasso’s 1925 The Kiss, recently at SAM, both pictures collage-inspired multi-figure jigsaws, almost but not quite splintered into incoherence.

To begin the three-part drama pictured here, Picasso/Minotaur attempts to assault the cubist-faced Geisha, with his tail approaching her crotch, in a lush interior filled with gold-leaf opium smoke and decorated with lovingly depicted tiles and tapestries.The drama of pursued and pursuer is echoed in the drama of the flat versus the dimensional, patterned surfaces wrestling with eruptions of dimensional form.The Minotaur, rejected, begs on his knees, while the geisha hides her contempt with a mask.Finally, the geisha turns to leave with a tiny female companion, while the Minotaur attempts to drown his sorrows with a Neoclassical urn pouring out white braids of a bizarre fluid, while a dazed sage literally rides on his inebriated coattails.

The history of art that Gabrielle Bakker so lovingly raids has been overwhelmingly male up until recent times.Her striking, woman-dominated pictures (the men, when present, are either predatory or pathetic) have earned their right to both raid and tweak the legacy of Picasso, but her project of High Eclecticism – of which this is the first public showing – is still very much a work in progress.

Most of us have heard the conspiracy theory: Mozart, a lifelong Freemason, disclosed secret Masonic ceremonies in The Magic Flute and was subsequently whacked for his indiscretion at the tender age of 34. This is, of course, a load of hooey. Everybody knows that Salieri killed him. Still, it’s too bad that poor Mozart croaked so young. He was just starting to make some interesting music. I mean, his last two symphonies (40 and 41) were the best of his entire output, some 626 officially classified pieces. The Magic Flute should also be included among these later, better works. It is unconventional – in places, downright strange – and is largely free of the cloying devices that mar his earlier output. Those who have read my reviews over the years know that I tend to give Mozart the short shrift; with numerous exceptions, I generally find his music banal and precious – not as earthy as Haydn, not as elegant as Gluck and not as wildly inventive as CPE Bach. But what he has on display in The Magic Flute is quite different than what he had been doing before. In short, Mozart was evolving. And then he died. Quite a shame, that.

The main challenge to any staging of this opera is to keep the magic chugging along, while giving a sense of place to each scene. This is quite difficult, as the action jumps around a lot. In this production, they come close, but don’t quite pull it off. Much of the time, we’re watching characters on an empty stage. True, there are nice touches, such as a large serpent (actually a Chinese dragon) in the beginning and various strange animals (Dr. Seuss-esque monkeys, a disco rhinoceros and a crocodile, among others) to offer a glimpse into that magical world, but by and large, the empty stage dominates throughout the piece. I wanted to suspend my sense of disbelief (I always do) and be transported to Sarastro’s castle, but that didn’t happen. When there’s nothing onstage, there isn’t anything to compel me away from McCaw Hall. Of course, the all-hands numbers in Sarastro’s realm, featuring pyramids and other Egyptian trappings were more impressive. The ridiculous, supposedly authentic Masonic rituals get treated with the solemnity of an estate auction. This is also the point where the music is best. And by the way, the chorus sounded superb. But that elusive magical element is nowhere to be found in those scenes. Perhaps, the most glaring example of this is in the final trial of Tamino and Pamina. Armed with the magic flute, the lovers endure ordeals of fire and water. All that happens is that they walk behind a pyramid, their outlines are projected while the lights swirl red and blue. It was all quite unimpressive. A little more imagination in stage design would have gone a long way.

On the other hand, the acting, in particular giving Papageno (played by Leigh Melrose) a free hand to behave as weirdly as he pleased was a great idea. After all, Tamino and Pamina are too bland, Sarastro and his minions, too serious, and the Queen of the Night, too scheming. Instead, Papageno ranges around the stage behaving strangely, which serves as a nice counterpoint to all the Masonic gravity and princely questing going on everywhere else. And because there’s a substantial amount of spoken dialogue, that gave Melrose an even larger chance for broad comedy. HIs acting was every bit as good as his singing. As for the rest of the cast, their singing was very good. Mari Moriya’s Queen of the Night sang with only a few slight hitches in her first aria. The second, more famous number went off flawlessly. The other main vocal roles: Jonathan Boyd as Tamino, Hanan Alattar as Pamino, Keith MIller as Sarastro and Ani Maldjian as Papagena, these were all very well sung. The performers’ voices fit the material very well and although their characters aren’t dealt the greatest range of emotions to pursue, they played their hands well. There was one vocal performance that bothered me and I don’t feel too good about mentioning it. But we’re talking about a professional opera company here, so I have to say something about it. OK, so the Three Spirits are played by a trio of youngsters. They’re meant to help Tamino in his quest to free Pamina from Sarastro’s clutches. They pop up occasionally to offer Tamino advice. I don’t know whether it was nerves or what, but they had some major pitch and projection issues. Like I said, I feel just awful about pointing that out. Keep singing, kids! But for Pete’s sake, tune it up a little. And speaking of that, intonation was also a fairly prominent issue for the orchestra, which was led by Gary Thor Wedow. Though it was primarily limited to the string section during the first act, these issues came up so often that it is worth noting. During the second act, however, everything settled down and the group sounded mostly excellent.

All in all, though, this production of The Magic Flute was quite enjoyable. Yes, there was a lot of what Frank Zappa called “the human element” present, but perfection isn’t necessary for a good performance – only a semblance of it. And though the stage design left something to be desired, it proved to be a very good show. As for the Freemasons’ secrets, all I can tell you from this production is that they spend a lot of time staring at pyramids, wearing cool robes and praying to Isis and Osiris. If Mozart did indeed give away secret Masonic rituals, he made them look kind of silly. And that’s why they gave him syphilis and made him become an alcoholic. No wait, Salieri did that. And take it from Rossini: VD and booze really do make you write better music. Until they kill you, that is.

If you haven’t seen Mike Daisey perform yet, you need to do so at your earliest convenience; if not this time around then certainly the next. Theater-wise, he’s a direct descendant of the rambling but razor-sharp monologist Spalding Grey, and perhaps Eric Bogosian as well. These practitioners were able to artfully juggle a mixture of the scripted and extemporaneous, the personal and the universal, in a way that gave audience members a glimpse into the inner workings of the performer’s psyches and then expanded the experience out into the larger world. It’s not The World According to Me so much as a public demonstration of how our own passions and neuroses are in good company, if we only take the time to pause and look outside ourselves.

On a comedic level, though, Daisey is much more of the lineage of Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden, the pioneer of pathos on a simple set. Daisey is a large man, a very large man, as he is found of mentioning at key points in the piece. (He’s hard to miss in front of the factory in Shenzhen because he’s very large, very white, and wears a Hawaiian shirt.) He uses his hands a lot, pretty much constantly, in true Gleason tradition, and likes to suddenly raise his voice for dramatic emphasis. Daisey’s version of “To the Moon, Alice!” is much more articulate and politically minded, but on a visceral level accomplishes the same end — shaking the audience by the shoulders to heighten a reaction to a line that is both funny and poignant. It’s the verbal equivalent of slipping on a banana peel, in the best possible way.

Daisey also sweats profusely, despite his loose black clothing and seated position, and this becomes an unscripted tic of sorts for the piece. Along with a glass of water and his notes, the only other prop on the set is a folded piece of fabric, which he uses to dab at his face throughout the performance. With so few things to look at–the desk and a stark but very effective backdrop of lit neon rectangles that change lighting for each new section–we can’t help but pay a lot of attention to the handkerchief as well. In a weird way, it adds an element of the physical to what is otherwise a mostly verbal piece, and also reinforces the notion that Daisey is one of the hardest working people in show business. The reigning Godfather of Monologue, as it were.

It may seem unfair to focus first on the physical details, but I think Mike Daisey would appreciate this approach; it’s how he dissects his own obsessions with all things Apple, from the early Macs to today’s iPods and iPads, and then discovers, interview by painful interview, the truly horrific working and living conditions in Shenzhen, a city in southern China where our expensive digital toys are manufactured. Daisey has an amazing gift for narrative, and a sharp eye for detail, and the two are fused together into a performance that never lags over the course of the evening. His fascination with early Macs was based on their beautiful design as well as their innovative functionality, especially compared with the Windows system. (Daisey does confess early on to a flirtation with Linux, but it was temporary, and he regrets this infidelity.) His riff on the ludicrousness of PowerPoint as a communication tool in any room where conversation is an option is by itself worth the price of admission.

Then there is the tale of the two Steves. Steve Jobs is the visionary, the cut-throat business mogul who brilliantly touts each new product as both indispensable and revolutionary, until the next generation is rolled out a short time later. Like a kid in a candy store, Daisey and his fellow Mac devotees cannot live without the next big thing. In rare cases where users have second thoughts about the latest device, the previous generation is no longer available.

The yin to Job’s yang is Steve Wozniak, the programmer who co-founded Apple. Wozniak is portrayed as a hulking automaton of a programmer who chugs three-gallon bottles of Mountain Dew before going on multi-day programming binges. Jobs is definitely the controlling force, and at some point decides that he can run the company without his partner. Now that Paul Allen’s biography is out, the parallels to the co-founders of Microsoft are uncanny.

The language is consciously religious, and as with “21 Dog Years,” the arc is a tale of hagiography gone sour. In the earlier production it was Amazon’s Jeff Bezos who eventually let Daisey down by his corruption of what he promised the internet would become. In this piece it’s not Jobs who disappoints — he is portrayed as eternally ruthless and belligerent — but the circumstances under which these digital relics are made. With the aid of his Chinese translator, Daisey is able to fool his handlers, and surreptitiously uncover the misery of the factory workers’ lives, a modern version of indentured servitude. Poor people migrate from the countryside for the promise of jobs, only to become literal prisoners in the factory/dormitory complexes. One of the most haunting details of the evening is the nets that are eventually installed outside the dormitories in response to the many suicides from people jumping off the roof.

The performance begins with Daisey’s paean to the early Macs, and then at some point, the two strands are layered. Clearly the Shenzhen strand has the moral weight, and should elicit more pathos, compared to a lifelong fascination both with Macs and the man who brought them to market. And yet on an emotional level, it felt like the insights and flirtations with technology were Daisey’s overriding passion, and the expose on factory life in Shenzhen were added to flesh out the piece. I don’t mean to say that the China strand was any less important to Daisey, or to his audience once they have seen this striking show, but it did seem like the agony and ecstasy of the title had more to do with a desire to acquire, possess, and customize the best machines that money could buy, and so created better theater. There are many profound insights into how our communication devices are becoming fetishes that need to be renewed on a regular basis. To worship at this church, you have to exchange your prayer books every few months, or be left out on the street.

Perhaps a minor quibble, but Daisey drops the F-bomb indiscriminately throughout this piece. I have no qualms about the use of the word per se — it’s one of the most powerful in our language — but it is leaned on so often that it started to seem like gulps for air in this extemporaneous performance, rendering the word into a mild and harmless expletive after a dozen or so mentions.

Daisey ends the show with a call to action: Enlightenment about factory conditions in China is the necessary next step for Western consumers, since we’re the ones driving this migration. It’s not just Apple products that are singled out, though. As Daisey mentions, if you want to know which of your digital doodads are made in Shenzhen, take out each device that you own and cut it in half, then look at one of the piles. The piece acknowledges its own consciousness raising, and urges people to continue thinking about the implications of our insatiable thirst for technology after the show is over. On an intellectual level this ending makes perfect sense, but on a dramatic plane it felt tacked on; the performance could well have ended with the previous section and made its point even better, or at least more organically. After the curtain call Daisey makes some announcements about future events, and this directive could easily have been delivered here instead.

And where do we go from here? It’s true that awareness is the first step to change, though Daisey isn’t advocating a purge of those shiny new toys. There has been a lot of mention in the press and the program itself about the other Steve attending a Palo Alto performance, after which Wozniak told Daisey that the experience changed his world view. I don’t think anyone who has seen this show will look at any item of technology the same way again, whether it’s an iPod or an MP3 knockoff , and that’s saying quite a lot. But it’s also worth sharing another quote from the program: “If you want to enjoy a good steak, don’t visit the slaughterhouse.” Now that Daisey has been to the slaughterhouse and back, and shared his vision with us, we can’t go home again, can we?

Into The Void/Catherine Cabeen and Company/On The Boards, April 28-30, 2011

Dancer/choreographer Catherine Cabeen’s first full-length performance, Into The Void, is like one of the lush desserts you might see on display in the window of a French patisserie.Like a sumptuous éclair, the dance performance is rich and ornate, stunning in its finely crafted components.Ultimately, though, like a rich pastry that leaves you slightly disappointed,Into The Void wasn’t as emotionally satisfying as the dance equivalent of a baguette with butter.

On The Boards commissionedand presented Into The Void, and the premier of this multi-media piece was highly anticipated, based on Catherine Cabeen’s impressive resume and considerable talents.A former member of both the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane and Martha Graham Dance Companies, Cabeen’s is a compelling stage presence.Since her arrival in Seattle just a few years ago, her appearances with local companies ranging from the University of Washington Chamber Dance Company to Donald Byrd’s Spectrum Dance Theater have been noteworthy.

For her inaugural evening-length work, Cabeen assembled an impressive array of collaborating artists, including talented costume designer Michael Cepress, digital artist/videographer Tivon Rice, composer Kane Mathis and sculptor Susan Robb.Cabeen’s five dancers are also strong performers, particularly Germaul Barnes, who performed with Cabeen in the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company.Despite this surfeit of talent, from beginning to end, Catherine Cabeen herself is the centerpiece of her performance.

As the audience enters the theater, they encounter Cabeen lying supine onstage.Dressed in a three-piece gray suit and pixie-cut black wig, she is illuminated by a square of light.She is mysterious and androgynous, lying almost still.Behind her, Cabeen’s live image is projected on a tryptich of screens.The house lights fade, the video projection dissolves, and Cabeen rises slowly from the floor to Kane Mathis’ blurry electronic score.She undulates from the very center of her body.Each controlled wave ripples out from her torso to fluttering fingertips or extended toes.Cabeen balances on one leg, lifts the other straight into the air.Holding thisprecarious pose, she leans back, almost tipping over into the void.Remarkably, Cabeen pulls herself back into equilibrium and repeats her movements on the other leg.

Catherine Cabeen’s company members join her onstage, two women in full, pleated skirts,one man in blue pants, the other in a stunning wide blue skirt.The six dancers pair off for duets, then change partners, testing the romantic waters.Androgyne Cabeen flirts first with the women, then the men, before a violent encounter sidelines her.

Into The Void is Catherine Cabeen’s homage to mid-20th century artist Yves Klein.And no doubt the performance resonated best with audience members well-versed in his artwork.For those of us with only a rudimentary acquaintance with Klein, there are simple references:the blue of the costumes echoes Klein’s trademark International Klein Blue.Nude dancers daubed in blue paint press up against one another, transferring their body prints the way Klein’s nude women rolled blue paint onto his canvasses.But Cabeen’s intent seems to transcend her salute to Klein.In her androgynous suit and wig, she is a feminine man, or a masculine woman, or a human who defies gender categorization.

And what does it mean to move through life outside the prescribed roles?When Cabeen is attacked by one of the men (perhaps for dancing with his woman), you wonder if the violence is induced by her defiance of a clear gender identity.Lying hurt by her attackers, Cabeen lifts puzzled eyes to the audience, as if dismayed to find herself a victim.Cabeen is rescued by an angelic female, wreathed in a golden halo of light.The angel frees her from the bonds of her wig and suit, returns to her rightful place, feminity.Oddly, Cabeen is waifish, almost fragile in her gray suit.Bared, her body seems to expand, her muscles are revealed.It’s a remarkable transformation.

Into The Void has many such moments.Unfortunately, they are sometimes obscured by unnecessary frills.The dancers wrestle and box with sculptor Robb’s puzzling inflatable black phallic tubes.Do they reference some of Klein’s work?And Tivon Rice’s video art doesn’t add much to the live performance.It’s like trying to have a serious conversation while a television set is on in the background.I’m willing to accept the fact that this cognitive dissonance is generational on my part.Still the video distracts from the dance rather than enhancing the experience.

Throughout the 70 minute performance, I was interested in what I saw, but never emotionally engaged with the material.Despite Cabeen’s mesmerizing choreography, despite the dancers’strong performances, despite the plethora of artistic and philosophical questions the performance poses, Into The Void doesn’t fully succeed in establishing a personal connection with the audience.The work felt far more like an intellectual exploration rather than an emotionally resonant artwork.I left the theater feeling the need to study up on Yves Klein, rather than feeling the visceral thrill of shared human experience.At the end of the dance, Cabeen, now in loose white trousers and shirt, struts toward the audience and bestows a knowing, Mona Lisa-like half smile on us.Like a wink and a nudge, we’re left wondering whether she’s challenging us to take seriously anything we’ve just seen.Like an alluring petit four in a patisserie window,Into The Void seduces with its beauty, with the mastery of its performers.Perhaps, you need to surrender to the limitations of this lovely sweet treat, and not expect that soul-satisfying moment of recognition that the greatest art can provide us.Surely, this was a question Yves Klein himself must have pondered.I’d better do some more homework.